We really need to get over our overly-neurotic fetish for flag decor, seriously. This is the 21st Century, not the farking Revolutionary War or whatever military event you can't get out of your farking head.

Now that shiat bothers me. If you want to fly the flag do it right: daytime or with a light, no rain, right-side up except for emergencies and burn the poor thing when it's too tattered to fly./ I don't care if you don't drive, but if you do drive, don't hit anything.// I only bought a flag to identify the country of origin for my vessel: legal requirement, otherwise, who needs the responsibility.///Everyone will know I'm American because I'm overweight, drink bland lager and only speak English. Oh and my cheese tastes like industrial lubricant.

While I do tend to get upset if people fly a torn flag or fly a flag at night I usually don't care about using the flag for stuff like bikinis or on cars and stuff. That said, using a flag for a tablecloth is extremely disrespectful and pretty tasteless as well.

Come to Canada if you want to see flags being treated poorly. Some people up here have no farking clue. I've seen an Irving truck-stop flying a giant Canadian flag that was so torn that it was completely missing one red bar and actually complained the the manager about it. He seemed to be completely unaware that that might be a problem.

Seriously, though, I guess the Girl Scouts indoctrinated me pretty well, because symbolic or not, I don't particularly like the idea of using a flag as a table cloth. Granted, I'd know how to fold it properly afterward (Thanks, Girl Scouts!), but still, there'd be crumbs and stains and things, and really, what is the protocol for washing a flag? (There must be one.) What a pain. Stars and stripes on a tablecloth? Sure! But not the Stars and Stripes.

liquidpoo:fusillade762: Instead of recommending the use of a flag as a tablecloth, HGTV ought to have directed viewers to one of the many flag-inspired tablecloths

So when is it A flag vs being "flag-inspired"? What's the difference, exactly?

One is a flag and one is not a flag.

To be more specific, a US flag is a rectangle with a 1.9 aspect ratio and internal design dimensions as defined in 4 USC section 1 and 2 by executive order.

There's a world of difference between putting a colloqual "American Flag" pattern, e.g. randomly-shaped cloth or whatever that has blue, red, white, stars, and stripes in some arbitrary arrangement, and actually making an entire, functional full US flag and subsequently abusing it. Just having kinda-flag-looking clothing or whatever is just gauche and stupid-looking, farking with an actual full flag, especially blatantly insulting shiat like using it to mop up food, is more... actually insulting.

Um, it's sybolic shorthand for the nation called "The United States of America", it's our primary national sign for naval signage in particular and international interaction in general.

If you're asking about the specifics of the design itself, we pulled from basically the color references and iconography of contemporary European naval ensigns, with special attention to the ensign of the East India company. So it's something of a reference to our history as a British colony (or set of, rather), though that's really secondary to just having an easily-memorized symbol that can clearly be recognized by another ship passing a mile or two off with only a spyglass if that.

You can essentially think of a flag as being equivalent to a nation's name, insulting it is sort of the equivalent of someone coming up to you and telling you that the whole Mojo family throughout history were and still are nothing but thieves and whores including your wife and children. Perhaps you're cool-headed enough to brush that kind of thing off, but you can see where some people would react poorly, even if the remarks were an inadvertent implication (I don't think the tablecloth thing was INTENDED to be insulting, so it's just someone casually implying that your wife trades sexual favors for cash on a regular basis without quite realizing it, maybe).

That has got to be one of the gayest outfits I have ever seen! His other outfits were much more manly.

/knows he was gay//could care less///Aunt still thinks he was straight (still blasts his music), and gets mad at any family member that tries to tell her he was one of them queery homos (her words).////slashy slashy slashy...

Um, it's sybolic shorthand for the nation called "The United States of America", it's our primary national sign for naval signage in particular and international interaction in general.

If you're asking about the specifics of the design itself, we pulled from basically the color references and iconography of contemporary European naval ensigns, with special attention to the ensign of the East India company. So it's something of a reference to our history as a British colony (or set of, rather), though that's really secondary to just having an easily-memorized symbol that can clearly be recognized by another ship passing a mile or two off with only a spyglass if that.

You can essentially think of a flag as being equivalent to a nation's name, insulting it is sort of the equivalent of someone coming up to you and telling you that the whole Mojo family throughout history were and still are nothing but thieves and whores including your wife and children. Perhaps you're cool-headed enough to brush that kind of thing off, but you can see where some people would react poorly, even if the remarks were an inadvertent implication (I don't think the tablecloth thing was INTENDED to be insulting, so it's just someone casually implying that your wife trades sexual favors for cash on a regular basis without quite realizing it, maybe).

That's more effort than I would have given an obvious troll but you've summed it up nicely.

Fart_Machine:That's more effort than I would have given an obvious troll but you've summed it up nicely.

This is pretty much exactly what I would have said... So apparently we agree. The reason I asked is because you said that people that are upset about the use of an actual flag as a tablecloth are just being pedantic (and I do not agree with that) so I wanted to know what it symbolized to you. I don't see how that makes me a troll.

I would LOVE to see a social movement where people who hate the South post pictures and videos of the methods they use to burn the CONFEDERATE flag. Imagine the butthurt that those tea partiers would feel. The best part about this idea is that the confederate flag isn't even a real flag, it's just some made up flag created by a bunch of half-assed racists anyway.

///Imagine the riot if a black person took his family out to a public barbecue area in, say, South Carolina, and used the Stars and Bars as a firelighter in front of all the others at the park! Delicious!